Ben Salter’s is a voice turned to honey-gravel by whiskey and cigarettes and love.

There’s a certain strain of Australian music that seems to draw its strength direct from the soil. It doesn’t, of course. Not really. It’s a construct. It’s recorded in a studio with flashing lights and fancy recording devices like most everything else – even if the studio is situated on a cattle farm 40km outside of Rockhampton.

The Stars My Destination, the second solo album from Ben Salter (The Gin Club, The Young Liberals, Giants Of Science) feels like that. It is something to do with the drawn-out beats, the pining slide guitar, and a voice turned to honey-gravel by whiskey and cigarettes and love. This is classic Australiana. This music could not come from anywhere else.

It’s “a landscape filled with bones,” as Salter sings on the emollient Bones Under The Dunes, sounding like a hopeful Kristofferson or forgotten 1970s Ringo Starr collaborator. Questioning. Always questioning.

The single Boat Dreams is extraordinary; jagged and alienated, guitars a crescendo of crucifixion. It could be about Australia’s disgraceful attitude towards immigration . It could be about long-deserted love. Either way, it is a massively affecting song, beautifully crafted between collecting firewood for early morning campfires.

The haunting Parrot Day might be even better, with its repeated refrain of “isn’t fair/ isn’t fair is not an alibi”. It could be anyone, anywhere. It is scared, and not scared to admit it is scared. This vulnerability at the heart of much of Salter’s music lifts him above most of his contemporaries with their swagger and poise. Salter is too worried for shows of bravado.

The band are great. Never intrusive, always sympathetic, produced by keyboard-guitar-player Dan Luscombe (the Drones, Courtney Barnett) and Gin Club members Adrian Stoyles (bass) and Gus Agars (drums). It feels like they understand one another.

The music seems timeless, in the way certain strains of Australian music (The Triffids, Hunters And Collectors) have always felt timeless. It is not, of course. It is conditioning, the knowledge that this sound is not as dependent on fashion as, say, Gotye, but still belongs in 2015 because there are so many people out there, left behind. Needing the solace of reflection.

If this was America, we might be taking a slow train across cornfields with The Band and friends: knocking back bottle after bottle, immersed in a male world of good-time camaraderie and easy laughter … except Salter is more driven than that, lost in his worlds of lost love and paranoia.

“I’m getting older/ But I’m not getting wiser,” he sing-sighs on the inappropriately jaunty I Just Can’t Live Like This Anymore, a song as great as prime You Am I. Probably greater. It’s the burr in Salter’s voice, the slight falter as around him strings soar (courtesy of former Thin Kid Scotty Regan) and bass sings. He stumbles, momentarily. He stumbles, and once again he is lost.

The wonder of this music is that it really is unconcerned with fashion. A saxophone funky and ready for a brawl threads through Vile Rat like it’s on day release from Seinfield. The angry-to-be-navel-gazing No Security Blues pays better tribute to the Drones’ oeuvre of politicised social angst than anyone this side of Courtney Barnett. Sure, you’ve heard it before but who cares when it’s done with such feeling?

The Stars My Destination (title taken from a 1950s Alfred Bester science fiction novel) might have been recorded on a cattle station, but it’s imbued with … the blues. Soulfulness. The odd burst of 1970s AM radio rock. Nostalgia for a future yet to come.